《不信则无》参展艺术家：倪海峰

参展艺术家：倪海峰

 Artist: Ni Haifeng

《逍遥曲径》（2021-2024）

In the Labyrinth of Liberty (2021-2024)

逍遥曲径 – 愚妄的镜像

该装置以《愚妄的镜像》为副标题，是以探讨人类自由的悖论为主题的《逍遥曲径 》项目的一部分。它旨在审视历史上的经济困境、谬误以及缠绕 于"逍遥放任 "（laissez-faire）概念之中的互为矛盾的意识形态。

从 1636 年的郁金香狂热、1720 年密西西比公司和南海公司的泡沫、1840 年的铁路狂热、1872 年的大恐慌、1920 年代佛罗里达的土地热、1929 年的华尔街崩盘和大萧条、20 世纪 80 年代日本的房价暴涨以及随后的 "失落的十年"、1997 年的亚洲股市崩盘、2000 年的 网络泡沫（Dot-com bubble）到 2008 年的全球金融危机，十一个历史时刻勾勒出人类在政治经济领域因贪婪而导致的愚妄行为这一反复出现的现象。1636 年和 2024 年之间的相似性愈发明显；在华尔街，交易虚幻的“未来郁金香”观念的狂热仍在继续，这一次，交易的是资本主义对自身复原力的承诺和乐观主义。尽管在疫情年代略受质疑，对指数式增长的盲目信念仍然主导着我们这个时代的经济思想。对我而言，这一跨越四百年的历史轨迹，似乎以某种片段的形式凝聚在我们过去四十年的经济加速发展过程中，呈现出同样的致富狂热、股市狂潮和房地产市场的淘金热，而这些旗帜正是人类幻觉的宏大镜像。

在广泛的经济思想背后，隐藏着对自由概念的不同阐释，即积极自由和消极自由的分歧。自启蒙运动以来，关于人类自由和道德责任的争论就一直围绕着这两种自由观展开。积极自由认为个人自由必须为更大的社会利益所调和，而消极自由则将自由状态定义为无外部制约，这标志着从社会主义、凯恩斯主义到新自由主义等不同经济意识形态的两极。新自由主义信奉个人的绝对自由——正如一面旗帜所言 "自由选择"（米尔顿-弗里德曼语）——包括"选择"贫困和苦难的自由。另一面旗帜反驳道："新自由主义资本主义将自由等同于消费者的选择，从而宣扬一种虚假的自由意识"（雅克-朗西埃）。

这一由字词构成的体量并非旨在构建一个语义实体，而是为了勾勒出一个在追逐资本的过程中出现的病态、愚妄和癫狂的历史空间。以 "逍遥曲径 "为题，这是一个文本、思想和意识形态的迷宫空间，其特征在于省略而非言说。重要的是那些没有言说的东西，那些被省略的叙事如同裂隙或反物质添满整个迷宫。

而在逍遥曲径中，或者说在一个由“逍遥放任”（laissez-faire）的历史轨迹所塑造的 "错误 "世界中，"错误的生活中没有正确的生活"（西奥多-阿多尔诺）！

文/ 倪海峰

注：副标题《愚妄的镜像》借用了来自于同名荷兰书籍《Het Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid》（《愚妄的镜像》），该书于1720年出版。这部作品是对被称为“郁金香狂热”的金融泡沫以及随后的南海公司和密西西比公司泡沫的讽刺性描述，并附带丰富插图。该书作为对投机狂热和人类金融愚妄倾向的历史批判，提供了对推动经济危机的非理性繁荣的早期的深刻反思。

In the Labyrinth of Liberty: The Great Mirror of Folly

Subtitled “The Great Mirror of Folly,” the installation is part of the broader “In the Labyrinth of Liberty” project, which interrogates the paradoxes of human freedom. The installation examines historical economic woes, fallacies, and contradictory ideologies entangled in the flawed and chaotic dynamics of laissez-faire.

From the Tulip Mania of 1636, the bubble of the Mississippi Company and South Sea Company in 1720, the Railway Mania of 1840, The Panic of 1872, the Florida land boom of the 1920s, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, the Japanese housing price boom in the 1980s and the subsequent “Lost Decade,” the Asian stock market crash of 1997, the Dot-com bubble of 2000 to the 2008 global financial crisis, eleven historical moments delineate the recurring leitmotif of human folly driven by greed on the politico-economic sphere. Increasingly, the years 1636 and 2024 do not look dissimilar; the maniac zeal of trading the ideas of nonexistent “future tulips” continues on the trading floors of Wall Street, this time, trading promises and optimism for the resilience of capitalism. The blind conviction in exponential growth still dominates the economic thinking of our time, despite the slight bump over the pandemic years. This historical trajectory of the last 400 years seems to fragment and converge in the past 40 years of economic acceleration in China, where one finds the same mania in getting-rich-quick, in stock market intoxication, or gold rush in real-estate markets, and of which the flags serve as great mirrors of human illusion.

Underlying the wide spectrum of economic thinking are disparate interpretations of the notion of freedom and liberty, namely that of positive and negative, which have dominated polemics on human liberty and moral responsibility since the Enlightenment. Positive freedom suggests that individual freedom must be mediated for the greater social good, while negative freedom defines the state of freedom as free of external inhibition. They mark the polar ends of the spectrum of diverging economic ideologies, from socialism and Keynesianism to neoliberalism. Neoliberalism believes in the absolute liberty of individuals – “Free to Choose” (Milton Friedman), as one flag reads – including the freedom to poverty and misery. “Neoliberal capitalism promotes a false sense of freedom by equating it with consumer choice (Jacques Rancière),” asserts another flag.

The art of words is not intended to construct a semantic entity, but rather to outline a historical space of mania, folly, and frenzy in the pursuit of wealth. Under the title “In the Labyrinth of Liberty,” the installation is a convoluted space of text and ideologies, marked by ellipses rather than words. What is more important is the unsaid, which like lacunas or anti-matter, fills the labyrinth.

And within this labyrinth of liberty, or in a “wrong” world twisted by the wayward path of historical laisse-faire, "There is no right life in the wrong one" (Theodor W. Adorno).

*The subtitle “The Great Mirror of Folly” is borrowed from the Dutch book Het Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid (“The Great Mirror of Folly”), published in 1720. This work is a satirical and richly illustrated account of the financial bubble known as the “Tulip Mania” and the subsequent South Sea and Mississippi Company bubbles. The book serves as a historical critique of speculative mania and the human propensity toward financial folly, providing an early and poignant reflection on the irrational exuberance that has often driven economic crises.

《商品与金钱》（2007）

Communities and Money (2007)

《资本论——政治经济学批判》是近百年来被广泛引用的书籍之一。它对早期资本主义现代化的有力分析以及对金钱非人化效应的猛烈抨击，在全球资本主义的今天仍然具有重要的现实意义。它也是近代政治史上最具戏剧性的著作，被大多数社会主义国家的共产主义意识形态和各自的革命所利用。阅读《资本论》是艺术家倪海峰青年时期的记忆，也已经成为他个人历史的一部分，可以说，这一阅读是带有自传性质的。但是，当时还几乎是神圣的圣经，如今却成了一本蒙尘的书，也成了马克思自己所说的“历史的垃圾箱”的一部分。

这件作品以照片的形式出现，展示的是英文版《资本论》第一卷摊开的书页。在其中关于商品和货币的一章中，马克思分析了价值的普遍形式：货币是资本主义社会中权力的最高代表，也是日益分裂和支离破碎的社会中连接人们的唯一纽带。这一页被艺术家放置在尘土飞扬的环境中暴露了八十天，覆盖了一层厚厚的灰尘。八十天的时间象征性地概括了《资本论》文本表面的灰尘积累。在《资本论》诞生后近200年的时间里，人类世界的表面一定沉积了更多的灰尘。    

文/苏伟

Capital, Critique of Political Economy, is one of the most widely quoted books in the last hundred years. Its strong analysis of early capitalist modernization and its fierce denunciation of the dehumanizing effect of money, still bear a significant relevance in our day of global capitalism. It is also the most dramatic book in relatively recent political history. It was hijacked to inform the communist ideology of most socialist countries and their respective revolutions. Rereading Marx is, for Ni Haifeng, not unlike reading into his personal history; it is almost autobiographical.However, what was also almost a sacred bible then, by now has become a book subjected to dust and a part of what Marx himself called “the dustbin of history”.

Commodities and Money is a photograph that shows the spread-out pages of the English edition Capital, Volume One, the chapter on commodities and money, in which Marx analyzed the universal form of value: money was the supreme representative of social power in capitalist society, and the only social bond in an increasingly divided and fragmented community. The pages are, however, covered with a thick layer of dust, having been left exposed in a dusty environment for a period of eighty days. Eighty days duration symbolically sums up the accumulation of dust on the textual surface of Capital. In its duration of nearly 200 years since the birth of Capital, far greater amounts of dust must have settled on the surface of the human world.    

《HS9701.10.00》（2016）

HS9701.10.00 (2016)

如果我们把商业编码也作为一种写作形式, 那么《HS9701.10.00》（2015年）总结了倪海峰工作中并行运行的几条线索, 如写作、语言、意义的生产、商品、货物流通、劳动和艺术。统一的商品描述和编码制度, 也称为“商品名称及编码协调制度”（HS），是一个国际标准化的数字系统，对交易产品进行分类。这个分类系统对世界上所有可交易的物体进行归类并指定数字，几乎将人类世界中我们能够想象得到的所有物体, 如人体器官和生命体转化为抽象的数字。HS系统本身是一个复杂的、非物质化的、数值形式的物体宇宙；同时，这一巨大的序列，清晰地表明资本主义的商品化进程已逐步侵蚀到物质世界的每个角落。这一项目对协调制度和艺术都采取了批判的态度, 从商品的角度来探讨艺术的意义。在这一前提下，倪海峰创作两张作品，分别为《HS 9703.00》和《HS9701.10.00》，两组编码分别是雕塑和油画的代码。两个作品明显的商业性质同时是对艺术的戏仿和对商品的模仿，可以被看作是一种扭曲的戏中戏（mise en byeme）, 其中HS代码作为作品的标题和它们的唯一内容重复出现, 或者是一种同义反复，在其中艺术重复其自身。作品创造了一个符号系统的短路, 或者说在符号和所指之间的零阻力状态, 其中的名称 (HS代码, 标题）和内容是完全一样的东西 (名称不再代表某种东西, 而是成为“某种东西”本身)。也就是说艺术变成它纯粹的本身, 虽然在这里, 它只是艺术的商业自我。

文/苏伟

When we consider commercial coding as a form of writing, HS 9701.10.00 (2015) summarizes the parallel threads that run through the work of Ni Haifeng, such as writing, language, production of meaning, commodities, circulation of goods, labor, and art. The Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System (HS) is an internationally standardized numerical system for classifying traded products. The HS is itself a complex, dematerialized, numerical universe of objects; at the same time, this vast sequence clearly demonstrates the gradual encroachment of the capitalist process of commodification into every corner of the material world. This project takes a critical approach to both the system of coordination and art, exploring the meaning of art from the perspective of the commodity. Under this premise, Ni Haifeng creates two works, HS 9703.00 and HS 9701.10.00, with two sets of codes for sculpture and oil painting respectively. The obvious commercial nature of both works is simultaneously a parody of art and a parody of the commodity, and can be seen as a kind of twisted mise en byeme, in which the HS codes are repeated as the title of the works and their only content, or a kind of tautology in which the art repeats itself. The work creates a short circuit in the signifying system, or a state of zero resistance between sign and reference, where the name (HS code, title) and the content are the same thing (the name no longer stands for something, but becomes “something” itself). That is to say, art becomes its pure self, although in this case, it is only the commercial self of art.